The Chandler Project Blog

(My Space + Facebook are heretofore referred to as My Face.)

Maybe not if My Face means the following to you:

1. Here’s me gone wild at happy hour after I got laid off.

2. Here’s a picture of my boss gone wild at Mardi Gras I found on the internet.

3. Gold text on silver background.

4. Blink tag.

5. Repeating zebra background that makes it impossible to read anything that isn’t blinking gold text on silver background.

6. Altar to Slash from Guns N’ Roses. So hhhot!

But if you step away from My Face and take a look at it in the abstract, the difference between My Face and ‘adult’ modes of communication (email, mailing lists, IM, SMS, blogs, feeds) essentially boils down to layout. My Face is full-on, full-boar, multi-channel communication with pictures, video, music all coming at you *at the same time, NOT a long scrolling page of text occasionally wrapped around embedded images and video.

Gen Y communication is concomitant. Even as your reading this long blog post, some of you are probably skimming up, down and around the page, reading in figure eights, trying to take in linear text all at once, as a picture.

How overwhelming, not to mention tacky. But the multi-channeled hodgepodge experience My Face provides is more true to life. Life in the ‘real’, physical world is a multi-media affair (an oftentimes tacky multi-media affair). But hanging out with friends on My Face is in some ways better (or at least more scalable) than hanging out with them in real-time / real-life because like email, IM and blogs, My Face is virtual and not bound by the limitations of time and space.

1. Location is not an issue.

2. Like email and IM, hanging out on My Face is an asynchronous activity. Unlike face-to-face interactions, leaving a friend hanging for a few seconds, minutes or even hours as you switch focus to engage with othes isn’t rude, it’s routine.

Nevertheless, like IM, the irreducible unit is still the friend, contact, person…so My Face isn’t as granular / flexible as email which comes in discrete units (messages) organized by topic (threads) addressed to an ever-changing cast of contacts.

But what we gain with the loss of granularity! My Face gives you a wholistic(ish) view into your friend’s comings and goings. The gestalt of your My Face companions are offered up on their pages. They’re open as a book, but unlike a book, they’re consumed with a 3 second glancing shot down the page (assuming it loads quickly enough).

It turns out that the very granularity that makes email an unparalleled productivity tool is also the very thing that is its undoing.

Instead of managing people we’re managing individual messages. Topic areas span dozens of emails and email threads. As we vigilantly stand over our Inboxes devouring every morsel that comes in, we lose sight of the big picture.

The fluidity with which individuals can be added and dropped from threads means that through the filter of our individual Inboxes, we are each touching a different part of the proverbial elephant.

So we’ve come full circle, can My Face be applied to the workplace, if so how? Even more interesting, could modeling My Face around the small work-group collaboration scenarios we’ve been focusing on make for a better My Face experience overall?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Product Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.